Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on healthcare

On November 8, Americans will have the chance to go to the polls
and elect the next president of the United States.

Both major parties, Republican and Democrat, will make their
cases to voters in the coming weeks.

Perhaps one of the most divisive topics is healthcare, and how to
reform it.

Here's where each candidate stands on healthcare reform, based on
information taken from their campaign websites and public
statements.

Skye Gould/Business Insider

Affordable Care Act

Hillary Clinton has made it
clear that she plans to build on and expand President Barack
Obama's signature policy reform — the Affordable Care Act, aka
Obamacare.

As president, Clinton has said she will work to defend Obamacare
from Republican-led attacks against it, according to her website.
She also supports
offering a "public option," which would create a
government-sponsored health-insurance option to compete with
private insurers. Additionally, Clinton advocates allowing those
older than 55 to be covered under Medicare. Currently the cutoff
is 65.

She supports making healthcare more accessible to all American
families, regardless of their immigration status. According to
her platform, she will also explore cost-effective ways to make
healthcare affordable and accessible to rural Americans, who
currently have the
fewest insurance options and can face higher costs than those
in urban areas.

Clinton has also proposed doubling the funding for community
health centers, and she has followed Obama's cue to triple the
size of the National Health Service Corps, an organization that
helps health professionals provide primary healthcare services to
underserved communities. In exchange, participating health
professionals are either given loan repayment or a scholarship
throughout their medical education.

Hillary
Clinton.Getty

Donald Trump is strongly
against the Affordable Care Act and has called it a
"terrible" piece of legislation that was enacted by the most
"divisive and partisan" president in US history. He has
criticized the Affordable Care Act as having "resulted in runaway
costs, websites that don’t work, greater rationing of care,
higher premiums, less competition and fewer choices."

Frequently touting that he will "repeal and replace" Obamacare,
Trump has suggested that, as president, he will work with
Congress to adhere to free-market principles as much as possible.

Trump supports modifying laws that are on the books and that
prevent insurance companies from selling in different states.
Currently, health insurance is regulated
at the state level, and insurers must obtain a license to
offer plans in individual states. Many firms, such as
UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, and Aetna, offer plans in multiple
states. As free-market competition goes up, Trump asserts that
prices and premiums will eventually go down.

While more competition would in theory lower prices, it's unclear
how Trump's proposals would create legitimate competition among
healthcare providers.

Trump supports amending the current tax code to allow consumers
to deduct health-insurance costs from their taxes. He also claims
that he wants to review current Medicaid stipulations to ensure
that people don't "slip through the cracks" just because they
can't afford health insurance, though he wants to leave Medicaid
reform up to the states. He has also said that he would support
relaxing current regulations around Health Savings Accounts and
require price transparency from healthcare providers, though he
has not explained how.

Citing that providing healthcare to those who enter the US
illegally costs the US $11 billion a year, he has said he will do
his best to eradicate this cost by hunkering down on illegal
immigration, arguably the most
prominent issue Trump is running on.

Mental health

Clinton has released a
comprehensive plan on addressing mental health; it promotes
early diagnosis, integration of the physical- and
mental-healthcare systems, training law enforcement on crisis
intervention and suicide prevention, enforcing mental-health
parity, and investing in mental-health research.

Her platform claims that she will build on Medicaid to "increase
screenings for maternal depression, infant mental health, and
toxic stress, with the goal of these screenings becoming standard
practice in Medicaid."

She strongly advocates improving early detection and streamlining
the process for identifying and treating mental-health problems
early on.

Clinton
listens to speakers during a mental-health conference on June 7,
1999, at the White House.Getty

Clinton also announced a number of initiatives aimed at suicide
prevention, including creating a national force tasked with
suicide prevention that's headed by the Surgeon General,
enhancing suicide prevention and mental-health programs across
high schools and college campuses, and working with colleges and
research institutions to ensure that groups such as LGBTQ
students and students of color are receiving the support they
need.

She also advocates an effort to improve the criminal-justice
system to better handle mental-health cases. In response to a
candidate questionnaire by the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, Clinton emphasized the need to ensure that
those in need of treatment are not sent to jail or prison as a
first step, and instead receive the care they deserve.

Clinton also announced that she will enforce the Mental Health
Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which she cosponsored
and which "requires that mental health benefits under group
health plans be equal to benefits for other medical conditions."
As part of this initiative, Clinton plans to enforce transparency
by insurance providers, audit insurance companies to ascertain
that they're following protocol, and streamline a process through
which patients and their families can report parity violations.

Trump has also called for mental-health reform, claiming that
under the current system, families and patients are not receiving
the care and support they require. He has announced his support
for "promising reforms" being developed in Congress, though he
has not specified which ones.

In response to his
candidate questionnaire from the International Association of
Chiefs of Police about law enforcement's role in mental-health
intervention, Trump said that "unfortunately, law enforcement
will have to continue to play a role in how we proceed as a
nation with mental health reform."

He also expressed his hope that "community services and family
involvement" would play a larger role in combatting mental-health
problems as the nation moved toward solving the problem but
offered no elaboration.

Trump
speaks during a campaign event at High Point University on
September 20, 2016, in North Carolina.Getty

Prescription-drug costs

Clinton strongly advocates bringing down out-of-pocket drug costs
for consumers, and she has for years worked to reduce the
"unreasonable" cost of prescription drugs.

She has made her fight against insurance and drug companies a
key tenet of her campaign platform in this election, and has
done so in the past. In 2008, Clinton called for allowing
Medicare to negotiate drug prices with companies to bring down
costs.

She plans to deny tax breaks to drug companies in an effort to
restrict "excessive profiteering and marketing" by those
companies' ads to consumers. She has said that pharmaceutical
companies receive billions of dollars in taxpayer support, but
then spend more money on marketing than research and development,
a practice she believes needs to stop.

With regard to drug prices, Trump has said
that the government needs to lower barriers into the market for
drug companies that can offer "safe, reliable and cheaper
products." He has also noted that drug companies, though a part
of the private pharmaceutical industry, provide a "public
service," and, as such, consumers should be given access to more
options that include "safe and dependable drugs from overseas."